Mike Zamansky has posted another video in his Using Emacs Series. This video looks at playing music with MPD and Emacs. Of course, Emacs can’t play music on its own but it can be used to control music players, effectively moving music playing functions into Emacs.
MPD provides the server side of a music playing client/server system so you have to choose a client (the player) as well. There are lots of clients available and Zamansky considers three that leverage the MPC player and integrate well with Emacs. He tried but didn’t like the built-in Emacs MPC mode and Mingus. The video shows them both in action so you can decide for yourself if they work for you. Finally, Zamansky demonstrates a player that he did like: simple-mpc. It has a simple interface that is explicitly modeled after that of mu4e so it will be familiar to those using mu4e for their email.
All of this is really intended for Linux but as far as I can tell it’s possible to make it work with macOS as well. Apple, of course, has the iTunes player—which despite what many say, I find easy to use and flexible. I keep my music collection (mainly) on my iMac but AirPlay makes it possible to stream music to my laptop or other Apple device. All in all, I’m happy with the Apple solution.
Still, I like moving everything possible into Emacs so I’ve added a TODO to investigate getting MPD running on my Mac. I know that MPD can run on a different machine from the player so I could still have my centralized music collection. If anyone has any experience with MPD on Macs, please leave a comment.
The video runs just short of 15 minutes so you can probably watch it on a break. As usual with Zamansky’s videos, it full of information and definitely worth watching.